Limitations, Assumptions, and Brain-Control

Yesterday the MIT Technology Review had a piece about a new breakthrough technology that supports a type of 'brain-control' interface allowing users to dial the numbers on a cell phone simply by thinking of them.Credit - University of California, San Diego

From the MIT Technology Review piece:

'Researchers in California have created a way to place a call on a cell phone using just your thoughts. Their new brain-computer interface is almost 100 percent accurate for most people after only a brief training period.

Like many other such interfaces, Jung's system relies on electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes on the scalp to analyze electrical activity in the brain. An EEG headband is hooked up to a Bluetooth module that wirelessly sends the signals to a Nokia N73 cell phone, which uses algorithms to process the signals.'

The system has obvious benefits to people with disabilities, that for whom even dialing the numbers on a common cell phone can be an extremely difficult challenge.  Once this type of technology is enhanced and improved, one can envision the 'mind-control' interface evolving beyond the relatively simple act of dialing a phone number, to more complex computer interactions (sending short text messages, clicking buttons, searching for content, etc.).

But beyond the obvious cool factor of computers and smartphones reacting to our thoughts, I think this story is a reminder for any of us that design and deploy systems in our organizations, or are tasked with creating effective and important communications and messaging. The audiences that we are trying to reach all have their own set of challenges, that often causes friction in their acceptance of our new systems, or that curtails their willingness and capacity to absorb our messages.

Mostly we realize these challenges and limitations exist. But we also assume that our position in the organization will make whatever we are doing seem important enought that employees will simply have to get over their problems and deal with it.

We create the standard and necessary communication messages to distribute to all employees and in the next breath say 'But we know no one pays attention to these emails'. We litter the screens of our online Employee Self-Service systems with help text and links to dense 27-page User Guides, with the full realization that busy managers and employees don't want to be bothered to read them. Our IT departments support corporate BlackBerry and lately iPhone and iPad, but almost none of the HR-related interaction (messaging, training material, access to HR systems and information), are available on these mobile platforms.

So employees continue to ignore messages, work around the set of systems and processes we have installed, or require what we interpret as irrationally high demands for support to use systems that we think should be simple, intuitive, and frictionless.

But often we fail to see our end of the problem in these situations. It would be, as in the example of the mind-control cell phone, if the cell phone manufacturer blamed disabled people for their inability to make a simple phone call.

So today I am thinking about the tools I have deployed, and the communications that surround them, and considering whether or not I have done the equivalent of handing a cell phone over to someone without the ability to dial.

But until I can deploy systems in the enterprise that operate on 'mind-control', I think, as you may agree, we have a longer and tougher road to go.

All these empty spaces

This morning’s drive from one suburb to the next, on a commute that I’d bet is quite similar to many of yours:

Signs are everywhere along this suburban two lane road, the kind of road that you’d see in the near and semi-near outskirts of every mid-size city.  Signs reading ‘112,500 Sq. Feet - Class ‘A’ space, will divide’. I pass four or five of these signs on my 10 minute drive each day. Not really from my drive, but you get the idea

These seemingly relatively new, perfectly adequate, likely inexpensive ‘Class A’ spaces going vacant, with buildings designed to hold dozens of tenants and hundreds of workers hanging on to the three or four anchor companies, while holding out the hope that as the economy and job market improve, so might the corporate real estate market.  And perhaps it will.

After I pass the last of these ghostly office parks I stop at the local coffee/bagel shop for a refill. The parking lot is always packed with cars.  The shop itself, (not a hip or trendy place at all), is buzzing with activity and energy. This morning, like most, nearly every table is populated with people talking, drinking coffee, and working.  Laptops are out, portfolios, resumes, project plans, blueprints - all to be found. This isn’t a ‘lone hipster hanging out all day in a coffee shop with a MacBook while looking 'pained' kind of deal’, these are the kinds of traditional, rudimentary, and entirely adult kinds of meetings that used to take place in some of that vacant Class ‘A’ space just up the road.

Heck, all the ‘work’ going on in the place makes it hard to even find some space to sit and hang out for a bit. Kind of reminds me of how it used to be impossible to score a conference room in the office. Which in is of itself one of the dysfunctional paradoxes in many traditional workplace environments - management and leadership insist that everyone congregate every day in a central location, for a fixed time period, but there is hardly any functional, effective, and even available space to actually work together. So most of us sit in our offices and cubes all day and email, IM, and occasionally call each other on the phone.

What should happen to all these empty office spaces?

Can communities and organizations re-configure, re-zone, re-deploy the spaces? Should we start by tearing down the inner walls, removing the acres of metal file cabinetry (the unfortunate by-product of the unfortunate excesses of paper creation), and put some old sofas and easy chairs? Set up a range of flexible and communal workspaces? Contract with the local coffee shop for a steady supply of caffeine that doesn’t taste like it was ordered from the same catalog as the industrial cleaning supplies?
 
Our attitudes about work are changing faster than our infrastructure. The designers and owners of places like the coffee shop can (and have) reacted more rapidly to these attitudinal changes and more expansive thinking about what the appropriate ‘place’ for work can be. They might have better and free wifi access than many offices, and they provide for many a conducive work environment without being restrictive, you can sit wherever you like, stay as long or as short as you care to, even, in the best ones, allow you to connect with people that may not have anything to do with your company or work, but just might provide the kind of inspiration and re-charge that most traditional office workers rarely get to experience.

In ‘Caddyshack’ the Al Czervik character, a real estate developer played by the great Rodney Dangerfield observes, ‘Country Clubs and cemeteries are the biggest wastes of real estate there are’. I think perhaps if Al observed all the ‘Class A Space Available’ signs and the coffee shops and bookstores packed with workers, he might add ‘Suburban office parks’ to the list.

Logo Outrage and Lack Thereof

Have you seen all the outrage and crazed, incensed, 'blow up the interwebs' freakout that has accompanied the JC Penney logo redesign?

What's that?  You missed it?

Of course you did, because unlike recent and much more high profile logo changes from the Gap and Starbucks, hardly anyone seemed to notice or care about the JC Penney logo changes.

No massive Facbook protests. No derisive Twitter hashtag like #JCPFAIL that suddenly turned into a trending topic. The only reason I even know enough about the new logo to post about it is that I am insane and need to turn away from the computer once in a while.

Accoding to the press release, the new logo offers, 'fresh, bold design', and 'signifies the Company’s great progress in creating a more exciting and relevant shopping experience'.

And that may be true, lowercase letters and a two-tone vibe seem fairly exciting. I guess.

The reason I bring this up, besides it being the end of a ridiculously long and tiring week, is to ask a simple question?

If you, or really your organization, announces a big change, a major initiative, restructuring, re-branding, re-imagining of your corporate mythology and no one (at least by today's social web measure), seems to notice, then did it really even happen?

And if no one notices, and after the big splash announcement your Google Alert only fills up with services that picked up your press release and that is about it, is that a signal or a sign of your irrelevance?

Should JC Penney care that you did not even know they changed their logo, and that you certainly didn't rush to Twitter and Facebook to get your opinion registered? How could JCP do this!?!

Is this the most tedious post you have ever read?

Have a great weekend!

Feel like the walls are closing in around you?

Have you ever gotten the feeling at the office that the walls were literally closing in around you?

That you barely have room to spin around in your chair without bashing into something - a file cabinet, a cubicle wall, or an office door?

That at the end of the day when you climb in to your hip, new, and uber-green Smart Car you think to yourself, 'Man, it feels good to stretch out a bit'.

Well, you are not alone in having that shrinking feeling.  According to a recent report from the International Facility Management Association, the office and cubicle walls are truly closing in on most American workers, with the average office worker seeing their allotment of space shrinking from 90 square feet in 1994, to 75 square feet in 2010.

By way of comparison, the average size of a prison cell in a supermax facility is about 100 square feet. But admittedly, you'd make some pretty serious tradeoffs swapping your tiny cube with bad flourescent lighting and no windows for the extra leg room in the supermax. Not to mention some potentially dodgy neighbors.

So why are offices and cubicles shrinking?

The International Facility Management Association offers some expected explanations; desire for organizations to control and reduce real estate costs, the rise of virtual and telework schemes making larger office spaces less important, and the technological progress that has made computers and monitors smaller, and reduced the amount of paper that is generated and stored in offices and cubes.

Those explanations certainly make sense, costs for real estate are a concern, at least some people have flexible schemes that render permanently assigned large office spaces at least a partial waste of space, and laptops and flat screen monitors take up a smaller footprint that even a few years ago.  

But by shrinking the size of offices, and more importantly cubicles, are organizations sacrificing their employee's comfort and well-being to in order to shave a precious few feet of floor space?  At some point one would think this trend would have to cease, as there does eventually become a minimum amount of space needed to hold even a small desk, chair, and workstation.

But I think the better question is, if organizations are finding it either necessary or prudent to continue to compress and shrink the space assigned to office workers, and technology continues to render the tradtional concepts and approaches of office design antiquated, then when will we see organizations start to eliminate the office altogether?

For back office functions like HR, accounting, communications, legal, etc. is there truly a compelling case for the people in these functions to congregate daily, in a central building, sitting in personal spaces of ever-decreasing size and comfort, while generating excess costs, using energy, and with workers in their cars contributing to traffic and pollution reliably each morning and afternoon. How many days to so many information workers make the commute only to hunker in their tiny cubes all day, headphones on, coats hanging from a hook on the wall not more than a foot away from the computer?

Costs, technology, changes in the attitudes and working preferences, particularly amongst the younger generations really should be changing more of how we work, and how our organizations design and coordinate this work.

Closing in the walls around workers seems to be about the weakest response possible to these trends.

Postscript - The Smart fortwo pure coupe model is 8.8 feet long, and 5.1 feet wide, for a footprint of about 45 square feet.  So at lease most of us can still park one in our cubes.

Scalies

Scalies.

Likely you have seen them. In real-estate development drawings, architectural renderings, or even on a school projects, or aging enthusiasts model train layouts. Aside - not to pick on model train hobbyists, but if there ever was a hobby that really seemed to be in need of a freshening up, it is this one. If model railroading disappears, we will have lost not just a rich history and part of our expansionary culture, but the markets for tiny fake trees, wrangler jeans, and suspenders will also take a huge, perhaps devastating blow.

Scalies is one of the terms that architects have used to describe images and models of people and objects to inhabit, provide scale and context, and to ‘humanize’ and make more accessible drawing and models. The scalies help to allow us to see ourselves inhabiting the abstraction.What have we here?

Pitching your renderings and ideas for a new shopping mall?  Better depict the mall parking lot full of cars, the shops busy with interested patrons, while making sure to incorporate the right mix of people, ages, races, and so on. Why is it important, beyond the practical value of setting context and making the abstract more familiar?

I suppose one could argue that we no longer construct buildings, we provide the physical framework for experiences.  A new store is not just a vessel to facilitate the exchange of value, but rather a conduit for storytelling, and even, in the best examples, an edifice that becomes immersed in the culture and identity of a place.

But as described in this recent New York Times piece on the use of these human images and forms in the design and sales process, the scalies need always to remember their proper place in the importance heirarchy. According to the article ‘the most important factor is making sure any individual (scalie) isn’t so remarkable as to distract from the scene as a whole.

The scalies inhabit but don’t manipulate, they support but do not challenge, they are familiar enough, but never threaten or confront - whether the scene is an office park, condominium tower, or a new publicly subsidized professional sports palace. Designers and architects imbue ‘humanity’ onto a scene by the addition of a collection of formless, unfeeling, indistinguishable images of people that conform to our pre-conceived ‘non-offensive while being suitably diverse’ checklist.  Make sure we have a guy in a hoodie with an iPod, a business dude talking on a cell phone, and a few women and kids to balance the entire scene out. After all, the individuals don’t matter, what matters is the entirety of the presentation, and the vague notion of fit, balance, and perhaps event conformity that a carefully curated collection of scalies imparts upon the scene.

We have reached the part of this post where I (attempt to) make a telling and apt comparison to the architect’s use of these inhuman scalies to the world of work - maybe to our surface attempts at diversity hiring and development programs; or our marketing and communications departments strident efforts to ensure that all of out corporate communications use suitably diverse but non-offensive stock photography.  Truth is I can’t really make a convincing argument or even conjure a profound or even pithy metaphor here. Truth is I just wanted to see if I could write 600 words about ‘scalies’.

But I will just leave it at this - the next time I see one of those ‘What is it like to work here’ videos on a corporate career site that features an employee working in a low-wage, low-skilled job, that may or may not have had a couple of run-ins with the law in the past, has a ‘look’ that might cause you to wait for the next train on the subway, but has worked hard to overcome some shaky decisions and get back on a better path, helped in no small part by working at XYZ Corporation, it will probably be the first.  That kind of thing might be a little too real I suppose.

Picture credit - Marcus Hoffko.  For more information about his work please click here.